When the Opposition Leader Bill Shorten announces that 90% of women with intellectual disabilities have been sexually assaulted, as reported in the media; what does that say about Australian men in the twenty first century? Cynics will say that not much has changed in regard to the male variety of the homosapien species over the millennia. Blame it on Darwin and his evolutionary theories, or rather the biological reality of our rampant desire to exist and to propagate the species. What we consider as our humanity, may just be a thin covering of marmalade on a very thick slice of indigestible burnt toast. What kind of man sexually abuses an intellectually disabled woman or girl?
Lack of Royal Commission Affects the Health of Disabled
The Labor Leader’s call for a Royal commission into the violence and abuse against people with disabilities has, it seems, fallen on deaf ears. Prime Minister Turnbull and his government have rejected the call for the commission, and handballed responsibility off to the states, in a traditional move much favoured by federal governments of all persuasions. Disability has been the neglected domain of governments, since they took it over in part from those charitable organisations. Those Christian organisations, peopled with a few exceedingly distasteful sexual abusers, whose carnal appetites feed on the vulnerable within our communities.
Paedophiles will hunt at home, more often..
Disability support programs, many of them wonderful, are still in the process of shaking off the tentacles of the paedophiles and other sexual deviants. A more positive disability discourse is beginning to emerge with things like the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), but this is only a start in the right direction. Do we need to bring the bad stuff to light, as a community, to clearly identify the transgressors and those in power who looked the other way? Is this important, also, for the disabled and their families to put to bed the ghosts of institutionalised neglect and abuse?
The Turnbull government’s decision to back the Hinch Bill and ground our Australian sexual transgressors, by taking away their passports, will mean that these paedophiles will hunt at home, more often in the future. Thus, protection of our vulnerable from these evil doers, who pretend to be ‘carers’ in the system, becomes paramount. We must increase the scrutiny and pay real attention to what is happening in an area of human life that we have studiously ignored in the past. Royal Commissions are expensive and they line the pockets of lawyers, but they also serve to focus community attention on the plight of those who are suffering.